


Last Light

by appleheart



Category: Pitch Black (2000)
Genre: Blackmail, Character Death Fix, Disabled Character, F/M, Haunting, POV Female Character, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-06-16
Packaged: 2018-04-02 21:16:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4074145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/appleheart/pseuds/appleheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What Fry has: a ship, a ghost, and a fear of the dark. What Fry doesn't have: legs that work, money, or a future. Riddick owes her a life. If he doesn't pay his debt, the bounty still on his head might pay hers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is about and drawn from "Pitch Black" alone, not the sequels. Ongoing.

“Lights on,” murmurs Carolyn Fry.

For the usual breathless, gut-twisting moment, she waits for nothing to happen--for the panels to remain dark, for the eclipse to plunge her world into blackness, for the eyeless shrieking monsters to descend and tear her apart.

Then the moment passes. The lights of the skiff flicker into life, a long ribbon of yellow-green unspooling towards the cockpit. Fry breathes again. No monsters.

(This time, anyway, drawls the voice in the back of her head that sounds like Johns. There’s always tomorrow.)

Lighted docking bay into lighted skiff, with no darkness in between. Setting her palms to the wheels of her chair, Fry rolls up the ramp. It’s a small craft, not designed for long voyages or for handicapped pilots. She makes the best of both shortcomings. Maneuvering in the tight space, she slaps the controls to seal the hatch behind her. She twists around to collect a handful of ration bars and a flask from the bulkhead, and tosses them forward onto the passenger seat. Lastly she clips the wheelchair to the lockdown clamps she had installed for that purpose.

All settled and secure. Fry slides to the deck and drags herself into the cockpit. Teeth gritted, she hauls her lower half after herself into the pilot’s chair and buckles in.

(The dead bounty hunter whispers: How much do you weigh now, Carolyn?)

The short trip exhausted her. She tires easily these days. She waits to catch her breath, fingers knotting in her sweaty golden hair. When she can speak evenly, she toggles the communicator and announces, “Pilot Caroline Owens speaking. Personal craft _Sunrise_ requesting clearance to depart, destination Rhadamanthys.” She enters the necessary registrations.

The Quorum Station dispatcher replies in a hiss of static. “Pilot Owens, you are cleared to depart.” The approved launch vectors appear on her screen. “Enjoy Rhadamanthys.”

“Thank you.”

A tremor rattles through the skiff as the docking clamps release it. Fry’s fingers dance over the array. All systems online. The engines roars to ember life. The skiff wavers into the air. She cranks the gear back. Like a slow bullet, the skiff shoots over the pocked hulls of the ships still in dock and into starry fields.

Fry keeps her eyes on the myriad flickering displays. She avoids looking past them into the blackness of space. Once away from the station, she eases into one of the safe, well-traveled interstellar shipping lanes. Only then does she switch control to the skiff’s computer and relax.

The trip to Rhadamanthys should take a little more than a week, Earth calendar. Two pilots could split the watches. One pilot, flying solo, could crawl back to the fold-out bunk, lash in, and drop into cryosleep. For Fry, neither is an option. Too much can go wrong in open space, even in a dreary shipping lane. She remembers. The little sleep she takes will be right here in the pilot’s chair, her useless legs crumpled in front of her, tubes and wires and pills to keep her running.

For an hour or so, she watches the displays. She retrieves one of the ration bars from the passenger seat and chews off a corner.

“Caroline Owens” is an alias, a bastardization of her given name paired with her former partner’s surname. An easy keystroke error, if anyone asks. That was for peace of mind. Legally, the skiff is licensed under her real name. The only people who would recognize it are her employers, the New Oslo Shipping Corps--or rather, their lawyers--and they won’t be interested in her whereabouts as long as she remains in contact. Which she will, more or less.

She hadn’t been off that nightmare planet more than a week, still in Decima Station’s intensive care unit, when legal proceedings began. A lot of property had been destroyed in the _Hunter-Gratzner_ ’s crash. None of the cargo was terribly valuable on its own, but pooled together, it added up to a substantial investment. All of it gone up in cinders or strewn across a hundred miles of bleached wasteland.

Not to mention the ship itself.

Not to mention the passengers who had died.

(Don’t you touch that handle, Fry! --Johns’s voice in her mind, mimicking the dying gasp of the real Owens.)

She hadn’t, she hadn’t sacrificed their lives to save her own--

(Not for lack of trying, though, Carolyn. --Johns himself.)

There was insurance for such situations, but the insurance companies were reluctant to pay. They wanted a scapegoat. Docking Pilot Carolyn Fry was the sole survivor of the _Hunter-Gratzner_ ’s three-man crew and therefore shouldered a triple share of the blame. From her hospital bed she recorded file after file,  documenting the circumstances of the ship’s journey, the fatal encounter with the rogue comet, the crash, while men in white coats told her that the damage to her spinal cord was irreparable. While they fitted her with a wheelchair to accommodate her paralyzed legs, she recounted for the lawyers every detail--

(You’re not that stupid.)

\--every _relevant_ detail of the efforts she and Owens had made to save ship, lives, and cargo in the wake of the captain’s death. The scout ship that had rescued her went back to salvage what data remained in the _Hunter-Gratzner_ ’s systems, to see if it corroborated her account. Fry didn’t envy the crew of that ship what else they would have discovered: the mummifying corpses of the dead they’d had no time to bury. Perhaps there would be no bodies. That planet was hungry.

The thought of the hellish place--its blinding, years-long days and its soul-shattering black nights--sends a shiver down Fry’s spine. She switches displays, calling up the data she downloaded from the station terminals before departure. Rows of glowing text fill in the darkness. Fry settles back in her seat, twisting the wrapper of the ration bar shut. She can’t stomach its contents.

The logs list the planet as M6-117. Her searches turn up mostly scientific journals. Supposedly, it possesses rare crystal deposits deep underground, as well as vast stores of salt in its withered seas. Except for one ill-funded geological expedition, whose broadcasts mysteriously ceased after a year on the surface, few have shown interest in proving the planet’s theoretical value.

(Can’t call it a mystery anymore, now can they? Wonder what makes a man so chary of hell.)

A single tabloid piece, decades old, dubbed it “Hades.” She doesn’t bother including that in her search terms. A hundred other planets, moons, and radiation-spewing stars have been slapped with that name.

Fry’s story sounded like hysterical ravings to the ship that picked her up. She can’t blame them for thinking she was out of her mind. Truthfully, she was: crazy with a fear that wouldn’t end (and hasn’t still), feverish, faint from hunger, weak from blood loss. When they delivered her to Decima Station’s medical wing, though, her ravings matched up with the report from the crew of an antique emergency skiff that had blasted off from M6-117 and tumbled into the shipping lanes, only a week before.

A blinking banner at the top of the display warns her of incoming correspondence. The NOSCorp lawyers. Fry flags it to view later and returns to her research.

That antique skiff carried three survivors from Hades. Fry has spent the past six months looking for them. Information is sparse. They filed no reports, conducted no interviews. Rumors place the imam--him whose faith had kept him steadfast when human hearts failed and human minds broke under the strain--on his way to New Mecca again, continuing the hajj that the _Hunter-Gratzner_ ’s crash had interrupted.

(I can’t see as how he’ll find himself any closer to his God than he came in that stinking hellhole.)

Some of the reports mention his disciple. That must be Jack. The imam’s own boys died screaming on Hades. Whether it’s Jack disguised again or Jack truly converted, Fry can’t begin to guess. In either case, the company of the patient imam can only be good for the skittish, maladjusted adolescent. Fry has left them vague messages in public data filters, not having a full name or contact for either of them, but apparently a holy man on his hajj spends little time in computer terminals.

It’s the third survivor she wants. Zeke Ogilvie, the initial report named him--another amalgamation of stolen names--but Fry knows who he is.

With a few keystrokes, she pulls up the public records on Richard B. Riddick: escaped convict, murderer.

His face fills the display. Without goggles, he looks strangely naked. The digital image has captured him with eyes averted, probably pained by the recorder’s light. He wears the smile that has little to do with normal humor and usually precedes something horrible. Fry smooths her hands over her stomach, clasping them over the knot of stitches and scar tissue there. The last time she saw Riddick, his face had been wet with rain, growing smaller as Death ripped them apart.

DECEASED blinks in large red type, just under the posting of the most recent bounty (fulfilled by William J. Johns, status: unclaimed) but it wasn’t Riddick whom Death had seized that night.

There is no information on him other than judicial reports and bounty postings. Fry finds an approximate birthdate and a probable star of origin, but beyond that, nothing. Then the first bounty, posted before he was eighteen years old. From that point on, the record contains only criminal charges, successful and failed arrests, and prison sentences, all incomplete.

No wonder he doesn’t count himself among the human race.

Fry closes the file (DECEASED DECEASED DECEASED) and opens the message from the NOSCorp lawyers. They don’t remark on her leaving Quorum. They demand an updated accounting of the maintenance that was done and not done on the _Hunter-Gratzner_ before its departure to the Tangiers system. They want some contradiction, some flaw that they could use to make the accident her fault.

There isn’t much they could bleed an independently contracted pilot for, but they can put her in debt for a good long while. Not that there’s much work offered to a paraplegic pilot afraid of the dark. The important thing to NOSCorp is that “pilot error” invalidates a good number of insurance claims.

When Fry learned which way the wind blew, she took all her savings and bought this skiff, the _Sunrise_ , even before the hospital let her roll up and down the hall unescorted. From now until the day the New Oslo Shipping Corps repossesses it, she is as free as a small ship and a wheelchair can make her. She only has a little time, but she’ll make the most of it. She is capable of whatever is necessary to survive.

(Johns: And tell me, Carolyn, what is so goddamn necessary about nosing after that sonuvabitch? Do you think he’ll be happy to see you? You were such great pals before.)

“I saved his fucking life,” Fry mutters, goaded beyond the point of endurance. “I nearly _died_ for him.”

(Maybe you didn’t notice, but gratitude and fair play aren’t exactly in Riddick’s vocabulary. You forget how he turned on me?)

“You had it coming, you unbelievable asshole. Jack was the only one who cried for you and she didn’t know any better. Riddick told me what you’d planned for her.”

(And if he’d been a good dog, I’d be alive and you’d be a goddamn tap dancer right now. You’d have done the same if they weren’t all watching. You, me, and Riddick, Carolyn--we’ve got bad hearts. You know it.)

“Shut your trap, Johns,” she snaps.

The voice that has haunted her since that week of solitary hell falls silent, for now.

Fry closes all the displays, except for those that monitor the skiff’s systems and the interstellar traffic. There is too much blackness past the hull, clawing at the seams, and the yellow-green light isn’t enough to keep it at bay.

But she knows a man who can see in the dark. All she needs is to find him, and the monsters will scatter.


	2. Chapter 2

Not even a sojourn on Hades could change the fact that Fry is a damn good pilot. Her spine broken, her legs traded for two thinning weights at the end of her body as useless as a mermaid’s tail, and she can still send this little skiff blazing from star to star as fast as any trick racer.

She reaches Rhadamanthys in only six days.

The journey through space has unpleasant side effects on human bodies, which is why most spacers cocoon themselves in cryosleep until the worst has passed. Fry doesn’t. She fears not waking more than she fears nausea, weightlessness, or the strange fogged feeling that comes over the mind in zero-G. She hasn’t showered. She’s barely slept. Her body resounds with ache. For the last twelve hours of the trip, she took no painkillers. She needs her wits sharp to deal with Riddick.

Rhadamanthys is a newly colonized world, gaseous, industrial. A half-dozen aerial cities orbit the planet’s core, so high in the toxic atmosphere that they are nearly satellites. Small stations a mile or two across, stacked like beehives, fully enclosed, with oxygen cycling through.

The name Zeke Ogilvie tracks to the fourth of these. Working, she thinks. The last thing a smart con would do, granted a clean slate by his supposed death, is behave criminally, and Johns said Riddick was smart. Riddick’s behavior with the survivors on M6-117 suggested that while he lived on the fringes of society, indifferent to the ordinary pull of human contact, he wasn’t against it unless it threatened him. Johns tried to convince Fry otherwise and failed. The only survivor of the _Hunter-Gratzner_ that Riddick hunted and killed was Johns himself.

Johns has been her loyal companion on this voyage.

A massive interstellar tanker has tangled up traffic at the port she wants at Rhadamanthys Four. Its pilot is a useless piece of shit. Fry waits for two hours--drumming her fingers against the dash, aching, calculating the last time she pissed--while the tanker’s rockets jiggle it back and forth, trying to squeeze out of the hangar.

A red-gold vapor cloud rises in a plume and erases visibility. By the time it clears, she’s had enough. _Sunrise_ is small. She fires its engines, zooms under the tanker, and squeaks into the hangar.

A buzz comes from the traffic control center. She responds with name, license, ship registration, estimated length of stay. Magnet cables tether the skiff until the engine roar dwindles to the soft groan of null propulsion. Then the hangar crew steers the clamps into place, anchoring her to Rhadamanthys Four. The skiff shudders and stills.

“You’re solid,” the dispatcher says casually. “You can go ahead, get out and stretch your legs.”

Fry hasn’t stretched her legs in a long time. The last time she remembers running was on Hades. She was racing through oily rain towards the gut-churning sound of an emergency skiff firing up its engines, the blackness above and behind and beside her filled with unthinkable teeth. She learned the hard way that the manufacturers of spacer boots shelled out for good thick soles and insulation, but spent not one fucking cent on traction. She skidded and slid in the mud and loose rock, knees torn, hands bleeding, her heart in her mouth.

She was running to Riddick then. She’s running to him now. She’s not afraid anymore.

Fry powers down _Sunrise’s_ engines completely.

Charts flash across her display. The port computers scan through _Sunrise’s_ systems, checking for red flags, while the skiff refuels on NOSCorp’s dime once more. If they find anything, no matter how minor, Fry will pay for the mechanic herself. She can’t let any anomaly slide. There’s too much at stake when one floats in pitch black space.

So far, it all checks out.

She could leave the skiff right now and do what she came to do--find Riddick, face the danger--but he doesn’t know he’s hunted. There is no hurry.

The Rhadamanthys Four hangar shines brilliantly. Light after light after light crosses back and forth. Illumination spills from all directions, so that no ship’s open fuel port or dented landing gear can hide in shadow only to fuck over the passengers later in deep space. There is no place for danger to hide. Her viewport is full of light. Her skiff hums in its docking cradle, hardlocked into the station.

She is safe.

Fry exhales. The tension in her chest eases at last. She unbuckles her harness and slides out of the cockpit. She kept a thermal blanket in easy reach for this moment. Wrapping it around herself, she curls against _Sunrise’s_ deck and sleeps at last.

* * *

Eighteen hours later she wakes, stinking and sore, her stomach roaring for food. The hangar lights blaze undimmed.

Fry relieves herself, no simple task, and eats two more ration bars from her stash before dragging her body to the skiff’s tiny hydrocloset. It was never meant to fit a cripple, but she smells like six days in a chair. She slithers out of her clothes and squeezes inside, holding to the straps she’d bolted to the ceiling while the jets pound her clean. When her arms give out, she punches the water off and lets herself crumple to the floor. The jets reverse, sucking in every drop of moisture to filter and recycle. Her hair makes a dandelion fluff as she crawls out.

These days she never ventures anywhere unprepared. Fry wears boots with actual traction now, vain gesture though it may be, with shorts and a thermal sweater under her flightsuit. The many pockets of the suit are loaded. Crew knife, beacon, crank light, firestarter, water tablets, five ration bars, a roll of first aid sealants, a multi-tool for miscellaneous needs. Today she adds a pistol to the upper right thigh pocket, where she can reach it even seated in the chair. Extra clips go in the left pocket.

(Think you’ve got enough shit to stop the monsters? Johns asks in the back of her skull.)

She can almost sense him, a nearly physical present in the silent skiff. If she turns her head she might see him, draped insolently over the back of the pilot’s seat with his tongue in the hollow of his cheek. She gives her head a convulsive shake, trying to dislodge him, and straps the brace around her back and hips.

(You should have stood by me, Carolyn.)

She tucks two chemical heat packs into her boots, and he repeats it. (Me, not Riddick. I wouldn’t have left you to die.)

Fry shakes her head again, this time in answer. She hadn’t picked one over the other. “He fell in with me, you didn’t,” she tells her persistent ghost. “You could have stood by _me_ and we’d all have gotten out alive.”

(That motherfucker was always going to kill me if I didn’t kill him first. Who made the first move, Carolyn? He had your number by that time. Knew he could ghost me and you’d _still_ have to trust him to get your people out. And when he didn’t want them puppy-dogging after him anymore, he’d have killed the kid, too, and the fucking imam, and every last survivor from your fucking crash. _You_ might have gotten out alive because he wanted to fuck you, and don’t tell me you didn’t know that.)

She did. It hadn’t mattered. “Speak for yourself, you asshole.”

(You’re a bitch and you pissed me off but I’d have saved you.)

“Like you saved Owens?”

She knows what would have happened if she had sided with Johns when the dying started. Hell, even if they’d gotten off the planet before the lights went out. She knows his type. They’d have slept together a few times, played at romance, before things inevitably soured. Fry doesn’t tolerate bullshitting and Johns didn’t tolerate being challenged. They’d have fought, he’d have found someone else, they’ve have broken up and turned bitter and rolled their eyes every time one heard the other’s name.

She knew all that from the moment he settled his stupid cap over her hair, like a dog marking his territory. It’s how Fry’s relationships go.

And if she had sided with Riddick--

\--if she had survived--

\--they’d have fucked, probably, and he’d have disappeared and left her to her life, and dropped back in years later with no apology and no promises, and then _that_ would have been the pattern until she grew sick of it and told him not to come back, and the man who could see in the dark would have dropped out of existence.

She knew that, too. Fry knows men.

(Johns insists: I would have saved you because it was the right goddamn thing to do. Sure, I’d have done you if you were game, but that wasn’t why. Riddick doesn’t _have_ right and wrong. If you remember anything, remember this.)

Fry frees the wheelchair from its lockdown clamps. She climbs into it, her prison and her freedom, and punches the controls to open the _Sunrise’s_ hatch. Even filtered, Rhadamanthys Four smells like an acid burn. She goes to find Riddick, and William J. Johns haunts her every metaphorical step of the way.

She dials into an open-access computer in the terminal and finds Riddick’s alias on the payroll of a certain company. She finds the districts in which it operates and rules out those which report a higher incident of violent crimes. Johns proves an unanticipated help here. She knows that Riddick would live by the adage _don’t shit where you eat_ , and she doesn’t want to think too hard where that knowledge comes from. She has made her peace with Johns as the phantom of her guilt and the companion of her trauma. She does not let herself consider less psychological explanations.

But she knows how to track a man like quarry, now.

She books herself a taxi to another part of Rhadamanthys Four, then another, narrowing down the scope of her search. In the back of her head, in a voice that is sometimes not her own, she thinks _not here_ and _not here_ until it comes to _here_.

When planetside nightfall comes, she is roaming a decaying stretch of the station. Its corroded girders are less than a decade out of the factories that extruded them. Off-duty workers, from the kinds of dirty, dangerous jobs that abound in new colonies, mingle with other men and women whose jobs appear on no public payrolls. Fry wheels her chair through the middle of these covered streets, giving a wide berth to sudden corners and dark alleys, following a dead bounty hunter’s instincts that she never learned in pilot training.

(Johns tells her: A man like Riddick can’t be found in the kind of places where people ask questions about their neighbors.)

At last she finds a place, grimy but quiet: a place that the law would overlook on its way to bust up a riot in one of the neighboring cantinas. “You lost?” asks the man at the door.

Fry tips her head back to look at him. From the wheelchair, his crotch is right about at shooting level. (Do it, Johns says.) “You’ve got a man in there I want to talk to,” she says. “He’s big, shaves his head, wears dark goggles all the time.”

“There’s no space for you to roll around in here,” the man answers, which means Riddick is there.

“Tell him to come out, then. I want to talk to him.” She lets the cash under her palm show. The man holds out his hand. She lets him see the handgun in her thigh pocket, so he can think about that, too, before she gives him the money. The man goes inside.

Her palms are damp with sweat. She stuffs the remaining money into the top of her boot and dries her hands against her flightsuit. In the doorman’s absence, she rolls the chair forward, trying to see inside. Dark, smoky, filled with vague shifting shapes (You afraid, Carolyn?), faceless voices arguing indistinctly, sudden bursts of laughter. She can picture Riddick in a place like this. Not _with_ anyone, but not shy about joining conversations around him. He’ll have a drink in one hand, swigging straight from the bottle like he does, a gun or a knife or some stranger weapon in the other, always prepared for someone to come poking around about that bounty Johns never came home to claim--

(And you think a man like that’s gonna come strolling out to see who wants a private word with him? I thought you weren’t stupid, Carolyn.)

Fry swears. She rolls the chair backwards so fast it nearly tips. She looks to either side of the bar: one side a crowded street, the other a trash-filled alley. She goes for the alley. Dented cans and empty liquor crates block her way. She wheels past them and around the corner in time to see a man slip out the door, the back door of the bar she or Johns had fucking _known_ would be there. Smooth-shaven head, broad shoulders. She’s seen his back in dreams and in nightmares, always walking away with that long remorseless stride.

Enough is enough. “Riddick!” she shouts. “Stop!”

He doesn’t stop.

(Think you can chase him down in that little scooter? the blue-eyed devil asks her.)

Fry draws the gun and holds it in both hands, leveled at the man’s leg. “Stop,” she repeats, “or I swear to God I will shoot you.”

She’s lying, mostly, though her finger tightens on the trigger. Riddick stops, but he doesn’t turn. She watches that tension close down over him, that familiar air of imminent violence, even as he stands still. “You got my attention,” he says dryly. The low drawl makes the hair of her nape stand on end.

She keeps the gun and her voice steady. “I just want to talk, Riddick.”

His weight shifts onto one leg. His right arm drifts down to his side. She doesn’t need Johns’s commentary to know he has a knife there. In a flash he’ll turn and throw it. A solid strike to the throat, her flightsuit no protection. She didn’t come to shoot him but now that she’s startled him, her life doesn’t count for shit if she puts the gun down. She tongues her dry lips.

(How fast are you, sweetheart? Think you can pull that trigger before he’s got you breathing through a second hole?)

“You’ve got the wrong man,” he says. “I heard that one died in a crash.”

“He didn’t,” Fry answers. “I saved him.”

Riddick turns his head just slightly. The light gleams off his black goggles, stealing any chance of reading his expression. He pivots to look at her--hand still trailing casually beside the knife strapped to his thigh--and suddenly Fry remembers how _heavy_ he is, all solid tense muscle. She has been remembering him walking with the air of a king, but that wasn’t it. He had only played the conqueror once Johns was dead and torn to pieces. Riddick moves like a man whose every step crosses a battlefield. If he’d been tall before, he’s a goddamn monster from her current height. She thumbs back the safety on the gun.

He turns. “I remember a woman who looked at me like that,” he says, not loudly. “Standing in the rain in the last light on that whole goddamn planet, too pissed off to remember how scared she was of me.”

He saunters closer. The goggles obscure the direction of his gaze, but she knows. He’ll be watching the muzzle of her gun waver, just as she’s watching his fingers brush the handle of the knife. It’s black and yellow in the alley, and as Riddick crosses in and out of the bands of light and shadow, her throat closes.

“But there’s something different about you,” Riddick continues. “See, _that_ woman died. Felt her blood run all over me. So who does that make you?”

Fry shrugs, keeping her eyes locked on those fathomless goggles. “The same one.”

“Interesting.” A slow grin pulls at his lips, one she might take for friendly if she didn’t know him. “Then why the hell you got a gun on me?”

“Just being cautious.”

“Sounds like Johns talking,” he mutters. Fry goes cold.

“Put down the gun, Carolyn,” he says then. She holds his gaze, squaring her jaw. (Sonuvabitch is _fast_ with a knife, Johns says, needlessly.)

It isn’t Riddick that makes her heart race and her throat clench. It isn’t Riddick that makes her scream through her nightmares. Slowly, she lowers the handgun, until it points at the ground between them.

His smile deepens. “Good girl.”

He holds up his hands, showing them empty, and closes the distance between them in three long strides. For a moment, before he leans down, his silhouette cuts her out of the lighted world. He peers at one side of her face, then the other. His indrawn breath stirs her uncombed hair. He smells like heat, smoke, engine grease, and liquor. Involuntarily, she shuts her eyes.

Suddenly the gun is out of her hands. She doesn’t try to grab it back. Riddick checks the cartridge, raises an eyebrow, and unloads it before handing it back to her. “You came back from the dead just to shoot me? And you didn’t even follow through.”

“I didn’t come to shoot you, Riddick. It was just an option to keep in mind.” She clenches her shaking hands. “Give me the cartridge.”

He pockets it instead. “At least you aren’t so fucking stupid as to aim an unloaded gun.”

Something in his body language shifts, settling. The wariness remains, but the violence fades into an afterthought. He squats on his haunches in front of the wheelchair. When he pushes the dark goggles up his brow to study her, his surgically altered eyes gleam like metal. He sees her in a way she can’t begin to imagine. He sees everything. The darkness has no defenses against him. The ratcheting tightness in Fry’s chest suddenly lets free, and she can breathe again.

She’s found him.

“Well, you found me,” he says, almost at the same time. “I got a couple of guesses what you want to say. Thing is, you’re not the only one in this alley who’s supposed to be dead, and I don’t fancy hanging around to see who heard you hollering out some dead con’s name and expecting an answer.” He slaps his hands down on his knees and pushes upright. “Looks like our reunion’s going to have to wait,” he finishes, and looks at her expectantly.

She recognizes the test. “I’ll follow you.”

Riddick scoffs. She stuff the gun back into her thigh pocket and sets her hands to the wheels.  “As long as you don’t run across rooftops, I’ll keep up.” He nods.

He doesn’t offer to help with the wheelchair. She doesn’t expect him to. But he doesn’t take off running, either, which he could have done, and that’s something. He paces his long steps like he knows _exactly_ how fast she can wheel herself after him if she really puts her back into it.

He leads. She follows him.

From trash-cluttered alley to dim corridor to corner to alley, in and out of the light, moving fast but not frightened. She doesn’t look at the darkness. She locks her eyes on his back, his head lowered like a bull between his shoulders. He keeps about ten feet ahead of her, but from time to time he’ll glance back. Every time he does, he finds her there.

Once he stops to watch her wrestle past a broken conduit that has flooded half the street. “Nice wheels,” he comments. “How’d you get ‘em?”

Fry’s attention is on the fucking chair. She answers through clenched teeth. “Not dying. Has its perks.”

“What are the others?”

“Not being dead.”

They are in a dark and ugly part of Rhadamanthys Four. The passages are empty of life, and the lights gutter. Riddick directs her attention toward a manhole whose cover has been lost, a gut-jerking drop into dripping blackness. She steers around it.

“We thought you were dead,” he says.

Her head comes up at that, but he has already turned away. She wants it to be an apology, but if it is, he’ll make her drag it from him with pliers. The hell with that.

(You’re dancing on razor blades here, Carolyn.)

“Shut up,” she mutters.

(How good _is_ your dancing these days? Think Riddick will waltz you out of those nightmares you keep having?)

“Shut up!”

Riddick leads her into a seemingly abandoned facility, a mausoleum of broken glass and empty hallways. He shoulders doors open with easy familiarity. His eyes shine in the dim light when he glances back.

He stops at the head of a flight of stairs. He turns to her. “Tell me, Carolyn...”

\--the others called her _Captain_ or _Fry_ but Riddick had stolen her name from Johns, and until now she forgot how both of them rolled her around in their mouths--

“... How far are you willing to go?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “As far as you do.”

He looks at the stairs. She looks at the stairs. The building isn’t that old, there have got to be lifts in here, but Riddick chooses the fucking stairs.

(Thinks he’s funny. Sonuvabitch likes to laugh and he’s always laughing at you, and if you think different, he just laughs harder.)

Carolyn rolls to the edge of the stairs and hoists herself out of the chair. She wraps her arm around the handrail. Her legs drag behind her. Hand over hand, she hauls herself down the stairs.

Behind her, Riddick says something about the chair. “If you’re worried, you can carry it down yourself,” she snaps between gasps for air. Truthfully, she doesn’t know what she’ll do at the bottom of the stairs, where just one pool of light remains before the darkness takes hold, but she doesn’t back down. She won’t cry for help.

A new thought strikes her then, and she doesn’t need to hear Johns’s mockery for her gut to twist. She cranes her head back to look at Riddick, silhouetted against the light at the top of the stairs. “Is this even the right way, or are you just fucking with me?”

Riddick grins. “I’m not the one to ask about right or wrong, but it’s the way I’m going.”

He hoists the wheelchair in one hand and starts down after her. Fry’s lips curl up against her will. She bites them back into place and resumes her struggling descent down the handrail.

When Riddick passes her on the stairs, he pauses--long enough that she thinks he’s about to pick her up, too, like a sack of laundry. She can almost hear him thinking about it. But he keeps going.

By the time she reaches the end of the stairs, she is exhausted, gulping ragged lungfuls of air. Sweat streaks her face. Bruises begin as soft-mashed places under her arms. She’ll find more on her shins and hips, she knows, though she can’t feel them. She hangs from the end of the rail, not beaten, just breathless.

The wheelchair clatters down next to her. Fry reaches for it and finds Riddick’s hand instead. He hauls her up, her legs dangling. Her breath catches. She clutches his arm with her free hand. She’d push him away but she would fall. (The gun, the goddamn _gun_! Johns rages.)

Riddick’s left hand wraps around her waist.

He has big fucking hands.

She feels his thumb just above her hipbone, in the twilight before sensation ends. His fingers press against the brace, finding the small of her back, just over the knot of scars and ruined muscles. She gasps again, and now she does shove away from him--hard.

Riddick doesn’t let her fall. He lowers her back into the chair, his curiosity or whatever it was satisfied. “They got you good,” he says, very quietly. This time she is too shaken to listen for any hint of an apology.

She’s angry, too. Furious that he got her to flinch. She resettles herself in the wheelchair with sharp jerks and pushes herself forward, not looking at him, as he steps backward away from the stairs.

She is too angry to notice immediately when they leave the last circle of light. They are far from human habitation. The air echoes with the distant drip of a broken pipe. The fading glow shows unpainted cement walls, spray-painted not with graffiti but with the arcane glyphs of builders.

Then she can see no walls at all. The light is behind her. Only the faintest gleam reflects off the wheels of her chair. Fry starts to breathe fast, but shallowly, so Riddick doesn’t hear. He is far enough ahead that she can’t make him out. She follows the sound of his heavy footsteps, straining to hear if he steps over anything, if the surface of the floor changes--

(Johns: If they catch you in the dark, no one’s ever gonna bury you, Carolyn. It’ll just be you and me and the noises.)

Her slick palms slip on the wheels. The crash of her heart almost drowns out Riddick’s footsteps. Then she can’t hear his steps at all.

She stops moving. All is silent, but the broken pipe.

She is alone in the dark.

(You and me and the screaming.)

Motionless, Fry searches the blackness ahead. She grips the wheels so hard that the rims cut into her palms. She can’t let go. Cold sweat soaks her skin and every muscle cramps with strain.

She is alone in the dark, and she is lost, and the water drips like oily rain.

She bites her lip, but a keening sound escapes her between rapid breaths. Her nostrils flare.

(Johns is laughing and laughing and _laughing_.)

She is alone in the dark and there are monsters everywhere, and this time she can’t run. She can’t run at all.

She is alone in the dark and she can’t run, if she tries she’ll fall, and if she falls she’ll be devoured in the dark. If she stays still she’ll be devoured in the dark. If she screams and screams and screams there will never be any rescue, only the devouring in the dark, and everything is dark, and she is alone, and she can’t run.

But then she remembers: she was wrong. She ran once more before her running stopped.

The very last time she ran, she had Jack and the imam at her back, and Riddick ahead of her. The very last time she ran, Riddick reached back and laced his fingers through hers and squeezed until it hurt because he would _not_ leave them behind this time, she would not _let_ him leave them behind, with that silent desperate grip he _asked_ her not to let him leave them behind, and they ran together.

He did not leave them behind.

He did not leave her behind.

Fry curls her hands into fists until her nails dig trenches in her palms. In her mind she takes aim and fires. Johns’s laughter cuts off. The hallway is black and dripping in the silence, and the hair rises on her neck, but it’s not empty and she’s not alone.

This is another of Riddick’s goddamn tests. He’s testing her. He can’t have gone anywhere. She heard no footsteps, no doors opening and closing.

He’s fucking testing her.

Fry drags a shaky breath in through her teeth. “ _Fuck you_!”

She grabs the wheels and pushes herself forward. As she does, she remembers the crank light and the beacon and the firestarters in the pockets of her flightsuit. The chair rolls five feet and hits his shins. She hears Riddick laughing, a rumbling dry thunder in the dark.

 


End file.
